​My name is Robert Levy and in Fall 2019, I will be starting my junior year at East Stroudsburg University. I am currently majoring in Business Management with a focus in finance. One extracurricular activity I do at ESU is being heavily involved with the Christian Fellowship (ESUCF), which is a Disciple Makers campus ministry, on campus. Through the group I get to reach out to people, help the community, and learn leadership and communication skills, with the goal of sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. After college, I anticipate on working to get into my desired field. I would love to one day be a Senior Financial Analyst for a large company.

My life has been impacted both positively and negatively since my father's accident years ago. Unfortunately, I can't even remember my father being healthy or able to do anything physically. It has always been tough as a young adult, let alone as a kid, seeing my father in constant pain. It gave me an insane amount of anxiety and ultimately made me question, why would something like this happen to him and our family? It was hard not being able to have your generic childhood of playing catch or doing things with your father. There are times where even talking about my father's injury or the past years are hard for me to do.

But it hasn’t been all negative. I had to grow up at a young age, learn how to help around the house, and help with my father and his medicine. I was turned into a man at a young age because I had to teach myself a lot of tasks early on. But what lacked physically in my paternal relationship, was made up through the constant love and affection shown by my father.

While it is not talked about much, I have noticed a bit of a financial impact on our family. I see how we used to go on vacations and money not really being an option, to now having to cut back. It started making sense when I realized that neither of my parents work due to my father's disability. This led to some of the emotional impact it has had not only on my life, but the moral of my family. I could go on forever, but to sum up what it has been like since the injury, I would compare it to hell on earth. Seeing someone you love in constant pain, both physically and mentally, is one of the worst things you can witness, especially from a young age. Depression, anxiety, and overall sadness are some things that not only I struggle with, but both parents do as well. I'm not playing the blame game whatsoever, but I know my father's injury has a large part to do with my mental and emotional "issues."

I am grateful to Kids’ Chance of New Jersey for this scholarship, which is not only a blessing, but a tremendous investment to me as a person and as a student. The financial aspect of college is insanely hard and just the thought of those loans are anxious ones. This will not only help me relieve financial stress, but also my parents. They have so much on their plates with health, doctors' appointments, and all the bills that come with that, that they don’t need to add helping me pay for college.

I'm doing what I want to do not only because it's what I have a passion for, but because I want to make my mother and father proud. This KCNJ scholarship will help me accomplish that goal and would be such a blessing to not only me and my future, but my family and theirs as well.